Continuing from my previous post.
There’s a song that gets regularly played off the MP3 deck of our car, and it goes like this:
This song comes from Curse of Monkey Island in 1997, and in it you’re supposed to try somehow to get your three pirate crewmates to stop singing and start sailing. The trick to solving this puzzle in this 1997 game is to choose a singing line which is impossible to rhyme – which our hero character does, hilariously, at the end of the song.
This little sequence comes from another pirate-y game that Matt and I both enjoy: the Monkey Island series. The series has been running for decades now, but I only got into it from the third installment towards the late 90s.
The series is essentially a humorous take of the entire 16th to 17th century Carribean pirate-era. You have a lovable Pirate wannabe Guybrush Threepwood who’s the hero, and in his adventures he’ll meet his nemesis, an evil undead pirate called LeChuck, and his eventual wife Elaine Marley.
The series has quite a cult following over the years for its great story-telling, music and voice-acting and that graphical adventures are few and far between considering that real-time strategy and first-person shooter games are now all the rage for modern video gamers.
The game over the years has also transited from low-resolution 2D sprite imagery, to the beautifully hand-drawn Disney-esque animation (pictured above) to fully 3D generated animation (below):
What hasn’t changed though is that playing through each game’s adventures is as enjoyable today as it’s been over the years. Monkey Island is thoroughly non-violent, takes cracks at everything and sundry, has full of running gags, and spoofs everything in modern culture. Sort of like a video-game version of the Asterix comic books.
And to prove a point: lines from the game figure even into Matt’s daily speech LOL.
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